Overview
The highest award a Girl Scout can achieve is the Gold Award. The award is earned by finding a problem in their community or the world and then planning and implementing a real-world project to achieve measurable and sustainable results. Completing this project is an incredible experience that will serve Girl Scouts personal development and career opportunities.
As the world changes around us, GSUSA is committed to ensuring that the opportunity afforded by completing the Gold Award project is as powerful and accessible as possible. As such, an initiative to assess the experience and outcomes of the Gold Award project was undertaken by GSUSA of which I was fortunate to play the key role in analyzing, interpreting, and sharing the results.
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Below are some examples of presentation slides, appendix slides, and an example analysis sheet, all of which has been scrubbed and approved for confidentiality.
Presentation Deck example slides
Appendix
example slides
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Example analysis sheet
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The Data
Categorical and continuous data from over 3500 Girl Scouts was collected from two sources:
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1. Girl Scout council reports listing the Gold Award earners along with some identification data, demographic data, and project title and theme (e.g. mental health or DEIA-RJ etc).
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2. The GoGold App, which sourced data directly from the Girl Scouts where they could tell us about how they spent their time (planning, research, implementation...) how they funded their project and how much they earned (selling Girl Scout cookies, hosting fundraisers, receiving donations...), and other data points like skills developed and outcomes.
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Collecting and managing data:
With over 100 local Girl Scout councils, data wrangling was a TASK, and a lesson in organization, email templates, and balancing kind language with timely needs.
Analysis
Aside from basic descriptive analysis (top project themes, how the average Girl Scout funded their project or spent their time completing it...), variables were cross referenced to learn more about how different demographics, project themes, or other categorically distinct Girl Scouts performed or experienced their Gold Award differently from one another.
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My unique contribution:
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Analyses for sub-groups were analyzed for their variation from the expected value (which was based on the overall averages). This was interesting because it told us what was particularly unique about a group and gave us insights into how we could improve the experience for similar Girl Scouts in the future (i.e. what project themes low-income Girl Scouts focused on, how they funded their projects, and how they spent their time; similarly, how Girl Scouts who focused on mental health, environment and sustainability, or education spent their time). For an example, see the Appendix example slides document linked above.